WORDS CHERI AMOUR TECH PICTURES MARTIN HOBBY DEBBIE SMITH YE NUNS / ECHOBELLY “I was hungover like a mother,” admits Debbie Smith about the didn’t survive her three-year-old brother’s intrigue) and annual first time we met in 2012, by the banks of Canal Saint-Martin in attempts to get her to pick up the guitar. “At 14, my dad had the Parisian summertime. Decked out in a dapper three-piece, given up buying me guitars after my brother and I would Smith had performed alongside Raincoats luminary Gina Birch literally tie them up into the tree at the bottom of the garden in the bohemian surrounds of the city’s Comptoir Général, with and shoot arrows at them. But at 14 I decided, ‘Right, I’ll try its colonial tiling and curio cabinets full of skeletons, rare bird now’,” she recalls. feathers and stuffed animals. Who knew that when Birch listed “I bought an Argos guitar, a really cheap amp and an Ibanez herself and ‘friend’ as that afternoon’s performers, we’d be flanger, which was brilliant,” she says. “It was huge and had rubbing shoulders with seminal Britpop guitarist Smith? six knobs on it and took two square batteries. It was a serious A consistent face in the backlines of the British music pedal.” From then on, every day after school, Smith would scene since 1990, Smith is no stranger to teaming up with practise behind closed bedroom doors, flexing her chord iconic figureheads like Birch, performing with everyone from structures around the first Siouxsie and the Banshees album: My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe in supergroup “I’ve forgotten a lot of them now, but give me a couple of Snowpony, to Au Pairs frontwoman Lesley Woods in Darlings drinks and a guitar, and I will go Banshees on you,” she jests. “I (completed by Ellyot, of influential queercore group Sister learned ‘Mirage’, because it had bar chords, but they were all George, on drums). Providing a dense layer to the wall of A shapes so I just moved the A shape up and down. I still play fuzzed-out strings and looping bass lines, Smith was called like that, I don’t do the correct chord shapes. I just play the as a last-minute request, rehearsing a handful of times in way I taught myself, wrongly, when I was 14.” Now, of course, Birch’s North London kitchen. She found herself adapting Smith is widely known as one of the formative guitarists of well to Birch’s unconventional musicianship: “She would say, a generation, and even today is challenging perceptions with ‘Can you make it sound a bit more sticky?’ Like a stick?’” London girl gang Ye Nuns; a rousing homage to American GIs But the guitarist is insistent that’s how she’s found a lot of and nihilistic krautrockers The Monks. But she wasn’t always women musicians communicate, particularly in the DIY scene a la mode, and although her initial collaborations were similarly of bedroom recordings, citing Siouxsie Sioux honouring John inspired by some of her influential greats – namely Siouxsie McGeoch’s knack for translating a request for “it to sound like and The Cure – she made her initial steps into the indie scene a horse falling off a cliff” into the band’s signature style. “It’s through far more unorthodox means. not about the technical terms,” she explains. “It’s about how Teaming up with a friend from sixth form college, Smith you feel or visualise something, and I enjoyed that because remembers: “We actually played publicly a couple of times, you stretch yourself and it makes you think, ‘How do I make but the only time I can really remember was at someone’s bar that sound sticky?’ It’s a lot more cooperative if everyone can mitzvah, performing ‘Carcass’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees. share ideas, even if you don’t know the chords or the beats.” Essentially, two spotty teenagers playing post-punk and Henri Today, we find Smith in the more familiar surroundings of Mancini at this bar mitzvah, very atonally because we weren’t her South East London home, greeted by a strong builders’ very good.” Jumping into another band shortly after, covering tea and her two limby Italian greyhounds. Her living room is Mod-esque hits, the pair actually went on to support That something of a creative space for Smith, who often works Famous Subversa with Vi Subversa of anarcho-punk band from her laptop surrounded by an extensive record collection, Poison Girls in a local pub, which Smith notes as a career the shelves bowing with music memorabilia and literature, highlight. Then, of course, there was her stint on bass in including David Byrne’s How Music Works, Lucy O’Brien’s Salisbury-born The Siren, and her sojourn straight into Mouth She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Almighty, “the drinking lesbians band” with two girls called Soul and Caitlin Moran’s new wave feminist tome How to Be a Debbie and a set of identical twins – who all liked to drink. Woman. We’re in good company. Smith was encouraged into Playing for four or five years, the group disbanded, only for musicianship by her frustrated, would-be jazz saxophonist something rather fortuitous to fall Smith’s way – not to mention father, who passed on his love of music through countless the phone call that would change her career – all in the records (‘Debora’ by T.Rex to mark her birth, which sadly space of a week. 16 17 Sifting through Melody Maker and NME small ads, her Echobelly was fronted by Indian-born Sonya Madan, and could think of”. It’s something of which Smith is aware: “You girlfriend at the time stumbled on the advert placed by Dean the 28-year-old singer was heralded as “a cultural icon, a can speak to women of colour who are into punk today, and Garcia and Toni Halliday of alt-rock duo Curve, looking for a female Morrissey and the UK’s first Asian pop star”. Adding they will tell you exactly the same thing – there are no black bass player. “I saw the ad on the Tuesday, phoned up on the an Anglo-Caribbean tomboy lesbian to the lineup, Echobelly women there. It’s a white teenage, male scene. Maybe black PEDAL TO THE METAL Wednesday, had the audition on the Friday and by the time I were a welcome break from the white lad culture of much of people think it doesn’t have anything to say to them, but I only got back I was in the group,” she laughs. But the shift from the era. “Britpop was a bit laddy,” Smith acknowledges, “but have two words for them: Bad Brains.” Boss CH-1 Super Chorus her lo-fi roots to a professional session musician didn’t come a lot of great women did get into the limelight. It was just a Snatching from the fretwork stylings of her post-punk without its difficulties: “It was difficult for me to adjust to being little tokenistic.” She continues: “The women were always sisters – The Slits’ Viv Albertine, The Raincoats’ Ana da Silva – Butterfly Effect MFKR Distortion a hired hand, and being in a professional band where you objectified; Louise Wener was objectified, Justine [Frischmann] Smith is still surprised when people hold her up against such don’t have to carry your guitar – the roadies do that. It was was objectified, Sonya was objectified.” And it’s an attitude luminaries. “People have been telling me that I have a fantastic Mooer Cruncher very odd that you didn’t have to do any of the donkey work.” that filters further down within the industry: “You can ask any guitar style and I never really thought about it,” she says. “I In 1994, it seemed as though they were on the cusp of woman who was in a band at that time – or right now – and just copied guitarists that I like.” In reality, her treble-drenched Jim Dunlop Cry Baby Wah doing great things, but with Garcia’s young children and they will have met a sound engineer who wants to plug their tones strung from her cream Stratocaster was Britpop at its the realities of touring for five years straight, the decision guitar in. You know, I’ve got to where I’m doing a gig, you’d finest: “I am fond of the treble. The treble normally goes all the TC Electronic Spark Mini Booster was made to end the band. But just as her response to the think I’d know how to do that by now.” Even when it comes to way up. I’ve started peeling it back a bit lately, but I definitely small ad had led to extensive touring following Curve’s debut musicianship, Smith contests there’s still a way to go: “Women played a really trebly guitar before I had any pedals. It was that TC Electronic Ditto Looper release ‘Doppelgänger’ (including a US tour alongside The are generally judged on how they look, or if they’re not good- really Au Pairs, Raincoats metallic twang.” Jesus and Mary Chain, who Smith would also team up with looking, it’s all ‘Oh, but she writes brilliant songs’. What do you Debbie Smith comes in many guises: from Britpop’s Pro Co Turbo RAT in indie supergroup Snowpony), serendipity would strike mean, but she writes brilliant songs? She does write brilliant Echobelly to indie juggernaut Snowpony, she’s the again, as Savage and Best PR (who managed Echobelly, songs.